Needful Things - Stephen King [321]
Five years ago he had switched to a video camera, which was both cheaper and easier and instead of boring people to tears for ten or fifteen minutes, which was the length of time three or four rolls of eight-millimeter film ran when spliced together, you could bore them for hours, all without even plugging in a fresh cassette.
He took this cassette out of its box and looked at it. There was no label. Okay, he thought. That's perfectly okay. I'll just have to find out what's on it for myself, won't I? His hand moved to the VCR's ON button and there it hesitated.
The composite formed by Todd's and Sean's and his wife's faces retreated suddenly; it was replaced by the pallid, shocked face of Brian Rusk as Alan had seen him just this afternoon.
You look unhappy, Brian.
Yessir.
Does that mean you ARE unhappy?
Yessir-and if you turn that switch, you'll be unhappy, too. He wants you to look at it, but not because he wants to do you a favor.
Mr.
Gaunt doesn't do favors. He wants to poison you, that's all. just like he's poisoned everyone else.
Yet he had to look.
His fingers touched the button, caressed its smooth, square shape.
He paused and looked around. Yes; Gaunt was still here.
Somewhere. Alan could feel him-a heavy presence, both menacing and cajoling. He thought of the note Mr. Gaunt had left behind. I know you have wondered long and deeply about what happened during the last few moments of your wife and younger son's lives
Don't do it, Sheriff, Brian Rusk whispered. Alan saw that pallid, hurt, pre-suicidal face looking at him from above the cooler in his bike basket, the cooler filled with the baseball cards. Let the past sleep. It's better that way. And he lies; you KNOw he lies.
Yes. He did. He did know that.
Yet he had to look.
Alan's finger pushed the button.
The small green POWER light went on at once. The VCR worked just fine, power outage or no power outage, just as Alan had known it would.
He turned on the sexy red Sony and in a moment the bright white glow of Channel 3 snow lit his face with pallid light. Alan pushed the EJECT button and the VCR's cassettecarrier popped up.
Don't do it, Brian Rusk's voice whispered again, but Alan didn't listen. He carted the cassette, pushed the carrier down, and listened to the little mechanical clicks as the heads engaged the tape. Then he took a deep breath and pushed the PLAY button. The bright N E E D F U L white snow on the screen was replaced by smooth blackness. A moment later the screen went slate-gray, and a series of numbers flashed up: 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 X.
What followed was a shaky, hand-held shot of a country road.
In the foreground, slightly out of focus but still readable, was a road-sign. 117, it said, but Alan didn't need it. He had driven that stretch many times, and knew it well. He recognized the grove of pines just beyond the place where the road curved-it was the grove where the Scout had fetched up, its nose crumpled around the largest tree in a jagged embrace.
But the trees in this picture showed no scars of the accident, although the scars were still visible, if you went out there and looked (he had, many times). Wonder and terror slipped silently into Alan's bones as he realized-not just from the unwounded surfaces of the trees and the curve in the road but from every configuration of the landscape and every intuition of his heart-that this videotape had been shot on the day Annie and Todd had died.
He was going to see it happen.
It was quite impossible, but it was true. He was going to see his wife and son smashed open before his very eyes.
Turn it off! Brian screamed. Turn it off, he's a poison man and he sells poison things! Turn it off before it's too late!
But Alan could have done this no more than he could have stilled his own heartbeat by thought alone. He was frozen, caught.
Now the camera panned jerkily to the left, up the road.